James M. Schmidt has earned a reputation for quality Civil War writing whether it be his medical column in Civil War News, his regularly updated blog Civil War Medicine (and Writing), his guest posts on various blogs, or his wide range of books.

In his new book Galveston and the Civil War Mr. Schmidt sets out three main goals: First is to provide readers a lively and well illustrated account of Galveston and the Civil War. Second is to add to the scholarship of Galveston by addressing subjects that have previously received little coverage. These include slavery, Unionist dissent, yellow fever, and the heroic actions of the Ursuline sisters. Lastly, to further add to the literature on the city by using previously unpublished primary resources. While I am far from an expert on the history of Galveston and admit to knowing little about the war there, I am convinced that all three goals have been achieved!

The book starts off strong with a discussion of slavery in Galveston and has Schmidt ably refuting the nineteenth century claims that slavery was not a major factor in the Galveston economy and also that slaves loved the island and did not want to leave. Just as the book starts strong towards one of the goals the ending (well, next to the last chapter) covers the yellow fever epidemics and the attempts of doctors to downplay the danger until it was too late. The period of 1837-1860 saw seven epidemics which left approximately 2,000 people dead. An 1864 outbreak left 259 dead with 117 being soldiers (more than double the number killed in the battle). Just after the war in 1867 more than 1,000 lost their lives to yellow fever with around 100 being soldiers.

Those who have read Mr. Schmidt's earlier book Notre Dame and the Civil War (IN): Marching Onward to Victory
will expect nothing less than the expert treatment given to the Ursuline nuns, who despite potential danger to themselves treated the sick and wounded on both sides. While opinions were mixed their convent was offered to the Confederates to be used as a field hospital by Mother Saint Pierre Harrington, leader of the Galveston Ursuline nuns.

While these "overlooked" subjects are really the gem of the book in my view, the fighting is given good coverage. The island city was an important one for Confederates to hold. When the island was blockaded in 1861 by Union naval forces the Confederacy ultimately surrendered it in 1862. Almost immediately "Prince" John Magruder began making plans to retake the island leading to the New Years Day 1863 battle that returns Galveston to Confederate control. The land/sea battle produced approximately 150 casualties.

Mr. Schmidt has an enjoyable writing style that is easy to follow. The book is thoroughly researched and the notes and bibliography contain a nice mix of primary and secondary sources. As are most books from The History Press this one contains a large number of illustrations and photos. These are a nice mix of vintage and contemporary and help the reader visualize what is on the page. This is a great introduction to the subject for those of us not familiar with the battle. For those with knowledge of the 1863 fight the seldom heard human interest stories are a great reason to pick up this book. Highly recommended!

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Many of you will know I am working on a book dealing with St. Augustine, FL and the place/role of the city in the Civil War. I'm always on the lookout for photos I can use in the book. During a brief weekend shopping trip in St. Augustine to the outlet malls we went into the old city for a bit and wandered through some antique shops just to see what was there.

I managed to come across a nice postcard from the 1930's of the "Old Slave Market". Now there is of course plenty of discussion to be found as to whether the structure was truly a slave market and some background history may be in order here.

St. Augustine was never a slave selling city in the way New Orleans or Charleston were. However there is documentary evidence showing that slaves were in fact sold in the city and that the market house area was used for auctions of humans. Historian David Nolan has uncovered advertisements such as this estate sale from 1834: "at the market House in the City of St. Augustine...A very prime gang of 30 Negroes, accustomed to the culture of sugar and cotton." He also provides evidence that the market was used as a place of public punishment for slaves as in 1840 slave Peter was "to receive fifteen lashes, in the market, on his bare back."

While Mr. Nolan does show that the "market" was used for the sale of slaves it is perhaps a bit dramatic to call it a "slave market". This term implies that was the major focus and that slave sales were a regular event. I have not seen evidence of such. The market was regularly used for the sale of meats and vegetables however. To not acknowledge the slave owning history of the city however does a disservice to the legacy of these men and women and also distorts history rather than face truth.

W. J. Harris
Photo: drbronsontours.com

One of the main origins of the term "slave market" can be traced to photographer W. J. Harris. Harris was born in England in 1868 and immigrated to the United States in 1870 with his family. His early years were spent in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Around 1890 he began his career as a photographer. In the late 1890's he moved to St. Augustine opening Acme View Company which was located near the city gates on St. George St. Here he sold prints and postcards. Perhaps his most famous card depicted the "old slave market"; a term which has stuck. In a later release of the card he included the following line on the reverse: "The old slave market in the east end of the Plaza is an interesting landmark of antebellum
days. Called "slave market" by an enterprising photographer to
make his picture sell." The Harris postcard is pictured below.

NOW back to the main part of the story. The postcard I discovered features "The Old Slave Market" on the front. What is most interesting about the card however is the inscription on the back.

Written July 10, 1939, postmarked in Miami Beach, FL, and being sent to Cleveland, OH the inscription reads: "We are wishing we had the skins of some of the slaves. It would be a little easier on us. Have done very little but loll & laze around. We are leaving Tuesday night for Havana. DZ & AH." I was amazed but had to remember this was from a different time. For $4 I couldn't leave it. Please see the scans of the front and back of the card below and make your own opinion .

From his blog: As is stated in the book’s introduction, I set out on this project not
attempting to pave new ground, nor to mine any new, undiscovered sources. From
the start, I approached this more as a storyteller than a historian. Students of
the battle will find nothing new here, for the intended audience all along was
not those who already possess an understanding of the battle but those
who are seeking a concise narrative; those who are seeking, perhaps for the
first time, a general understanding of why the battle was fought, how it
unfolded, and what happened as a result. My sources were by and large secondary,
with the works of Coddington, Sears, Trudeau, Woodworth, Symonds, and especially
Pfanz serving as my guides and providing the framework. Confrontation at
Gettysburg is a short work, coming in at around 250 pages of text, with
nearly 100 images and illustrations (including a number of incredible hand-drawn
maps by my good friend Mannie Gentile, which will knock your socks off,
supplemented by maps by Hal Jespersen), with a total of just over 90,000 words.
. . retailing for $16.99. As with all things Gettysburg, the criticisms will
surely come; for not focusing enough on the cavalry actions, for example, or
perhaps my handling of Lee, Meade, Chamberlain and a host of others. But this,
of course, is to be expected. My intention from day one was to write a clear and
concise narrative of the campaign, a synthesis, with the hope being that I could
both inspire further study and repay the faith placed in me by Doug Bostick and everyone at the History Press.

From the publisher: The commander of the three-hundred-wagon Union supply train never expected a
large ragtag group of Texans and Native Americans to attack during the dark of
night in Union-held territory. But Brigadier Generals Richard Gano and Stand
Watie defeated the unsuspecting Federals in the early morning hours of September
19, 1864, at Cabin Creek in the Cherokee nation. The legendary Watie, the only
Native American general on either side, planned details of the raid for months.
His preparation paid off--the Confederate troops captured wagons with supplies
that would be worth more than $75 million today. Writer, producer and historian
Steve Warren uncovers the untold story of the last raid at Cabin Creek in this
Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal winning history.
Be sure to check out the Facebook page for the book. There are already a lot of great photos there.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The Gettysburg National Military Park and Gettysburg College are teaming up for a March 2013 conference dealing with how to make Civil War history more engaging, accessible, and useful to public audiences particularly as the 150th anniversary passes. Scheduled speakers/panelists include David Blight, Scott Hartwig, John Hennessy, Brooks Simpson, and many more. Registration cost is $150.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

I personally have not seen this DVD but I came across this information today while doing research for my book. The Kirby-Smith Camp 1209 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is offering a DVD copy of the 1914 United Confederate Veterans Convention that was held in Jacksonville, FL. This is a silent film that has been transferred from newsreel film. I would imagine the quality is not the highest but it's only $13 and all funds go toward the camp's historical marker program.

The author John C. Guntzelman has taken photos from the Library of Congress and as he says "These photos are no longer just dusty old pictures, but rather have become very real moments in time from our collective past, frozen forever in color."

Guntzelman has undertaken extensive research to try and make the colors as accurate as possible. He has really worked to get things such as uniform color, building colors appropriate to the era, hair and eye color of famous generals and many more details correct. While there is much to be said for the traditional Civil War era photos being in black and white this new book does look incredible at a first glance. With an introduction written by Bob Zeller, President of The Center for Civil War Photography this book looks like it has a lot of promise. I am looking forward to digging in!

Friday, December 7, 2012

Set against the backdrop of Washington, D.C. author William Martin has written what can be called a dual novel. There are two rotating stories going on and despite the fact that 150 years separate them the two stories are in a way intertwined.

During one of his frequent night stops at the telegraph office Abraham Lincoln loses a pocket diary that contains his inner thoughts and ideas. Some of these are his working through of emancipation. The diary is discovered by Lt. Halsey Hutchinson. Hutchinson is a former soldier who was shot in the throat but managed to survive and found himself unwittingly a trusted friend to the President. Despite his efforts Hutchinson is unable to return the diary to Lincoln and as might be expected it is stolen. In his attempts to find the diary Hutchinson is exposed to and by some of the seedy elements in the nation's capital. Eventually Hutchinson ends up back in the war and serves at Antietam. We meet memorable characters both good and bad, black and white who both help and hinder Hutchinson in his efforts. Readers are even introduced to John Wilkes Booth.

Flash forward to today and we have relic hunter/document dealer Peter Fallon and his on again off again fiance/girlfriend Evangeline Carrington who stumble upon a letter that leads them to conclude the mythical Lincoln diary is real and could be found. As with the Civil War portion of the story there are many others also looking for the diary with many different goals in mind. We again meet an interesting array of characters both good and bad, black and white who both help and hinder Fallon in his efforts.

Does Hutchinson find the diary before Lincoln's death? Does Fallon discover if the diary is actually real and does he ever find it? In a book that moves along at a pretty quick pace with vivid descriptions of both modern and 19th century Washington D.C. readers will likely find themselves rooting for the good guys as the stories move toward their conclusions.

While I personally preferred the 1860's storyline with it's descriptions of a world long gone, both stories worked well and while the premise maybe a stretch of reality this was a book that students of Lincoln will at least find entertaining. The thought of such a diary would whet the appetite of many scholars. Readers of thriller novels will surely enjoy the dual plot lines and the action that is in both. This is a good read that I can easily recommend!

(Los
Angeles, Calif.) – Dozens of theories exist about how the Hindenburg went down
during the night of May 6, 1937. Yet three quarters of a century later, there is
still no clear answer. Many theories emerged immediately following the
crash. Was it a bullet? A static electric charge? A fundamental flaw in its
design? Or could it have been an act of sabotage with a bomb?

“What Destroyed
The Hindenburg?,” airing Sunday, Dec. 16 at 9 PM E/P on Discovery Channel’s
CURIOSITY series, conducts experiments never attempted before by
building three replicas of the airship and putting the leading theories to the
test.

Due to the scale and
volume of the Hindenburg – along with the intricacies of its design – no one has
been able to provide a satisfactory explanation of how or why the disaster
occurred, until now.

In the most ambitious testing program ever
undertaken, CURIOSITY attempts to crack the mystery by recreating the
disaster. “We’re examining and testing every hypothesis in the lab, selecting
those that are scientifically possible and taking them outside to test on our
huge scale models,” said Steve Wolf, one of the lead CURIOSITY investigators.
"Testing on this scale has never been attempted."

Few disasters have left such an impression
on the world or had such an impact on a single industry. The end of the
Hindenburg marked the end of the Golden Age of airship travel. And for the
first time ever, CURIOSITY sheds new light on the mystery behind what
really happened on board that night.

“What Destroyed The Hindenburg?” is produced
by Blink Films for Discovery
Channel.CURIOSITY is
overseen by Vice President,
Development and Production Howard Swartz and Senior Vice President, Development
and Production Simon Andreae. To learn more, go to www.discovery.com, on Facebook at
Facebook.com/discovery and on Twitter @Discovery.
Intel is a presenting sponsor of “What Destroyed The Hindenburg?”

About Discovery ChannelDiscovery Channel is dedicated to creating the highest
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world in all its wonder, diversity and amazement. The network, which is
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than 1.8 billion cumulative subscribers in 209 countries and territories.
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During the Civil War, poetry didn’t just respond to events; it shaped
them.

When Edmund Wilson dismissed the poetry of the
Civil War as “versified journalism” in 1962, he summed up a common set of
critiques: American poetry of the era is mostly nationalist doggerel, with
little in the way of formal innovation. On the contrary, argues scholar Faith
Barrett. In her new book, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave,
Barrett contends that a broad range of 19th-century writers used verse during
the Civil War to negotiate complicated territory, both personal and public.
Taking its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson,
Barrett’s book also argues that Civil War poetry was much more formally
destabilizing than scholars have traditionally acknowledged.

The book explores work by Northern writers such as
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and black abolitionist poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, along
with amateur “soldier-poets” and several Southern poets, including the so-called
poet laureate of the Confederacy, Henry Timrod.
Barrett devotes a chapter to Herman
Melville’s little-read postwar collection Battle-Pieces, and
another to the close connection between poetry and songs during the war.

Barrett co-edited a 2005 anthology of Civil War poetry called Words for
the Hour, and her own published poetry includes a 2001 chapbook,
Invisible Axis. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation from Appleton,
Wisconsin, where she teaches English and creative writing at Lawrence
University.

You write that the Civil War was a “poetry-fueled war.” What do you
mean by that?
Poetry in mid-19th-century America was ubiquitous in a way that it just isn’t
now. It was everywhere in newspapers and magazines, children were learning it in
school…. Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly basis, if not a daily
basis, in the Civil War era, and that’s a profound difference from contemporary
poetry and its place in our culture.

There are so many accounts in newspapers of
soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets, poems written on a scrap of paper
folded up inside a book; so many accounts of songs or poems being sung or read
to political leaders at particular moments. For example, after Lincoln announced the second call for a draft
... James Sloan Gibbons wrote this song
poem called “Three Hundred Thousand More,” which he
supposedly sang to Lincoln in his office one day. So there’s a kind of immediacy
of impact, that poetry is actually, I suggest, shaping events, not just
responding or reflecting on them.

How did these poems reach the general public? They must have traveled
somewhat quickly since they’re responding to political events.
The technological development of the railroad and then also the increasingly
affordable technologies of printing and reproduction had the result of
dramatically increasing the speed with which poetry could move around. ...
Harper’s [Weekly] featured poetry pretty regularly. It’s the equivalent
of readers seeing poetry in a magazine like Newsweek or Time,
or maybe even People magazine. ... Then also it’s a shorter genre, it
can be more quickly written; it can be written in response to immediate
events….

You say that it’s hard to find poetry arguing against the war;
why?
There was very strong support for the war from both North and South. ... You
do see, starting in 1863 and of course continuing through the last year and a
half of the war, poems where people register horror and shock at the vast
numbers of soldiers that are dying. Dickinson and Melville both register that
shock in their poetry. But writers who were well known didn’t want to attach
their names to work that was anti-war.

If we think of “Civil War poetry” as a genre, what did it look like
formally?
There’s a lot of variety and a lot of range. One of the reasons why this body
of work has been neglected by scholars until fairly recently is there was this
assumption that the work is all formally so regular as to be monotonous:
singsong, rocking-horse rhythms. Regularity of meter makes this work more
difficult for us to approach.
But one thing I’ve noticed in my years of working on Civil War poetry is that
there’s just phenomenal formal range. There’s lots of experimentation; there’s
lots of variety in terms of the formal commitments the poets are working with.
So you have lots of ballads, not surprisingly, lots of story poems, poems
written with traditional commitments to the ballad form, and also elegies. You
have poets experimenting with pushing beyond rhythmic and metrical patterns that
are formal. ... I would actually say that maybe half the poets writing in this
era are doing interesting and unexpected things with form even though they’re
not yet writing free verse.

My friend and co editor [of Words
for the Hour] Cristanne Miller has a wonderful new book called Reading
in Time that analyzes Dickinson’s formal commitments by re situating
Dickinson in her 19th-century context. Cris argues very persuasively that
there’s far more formal experimentation happening in mid-19th-century poetry
than we have previously acknowledged. … Cris cites Longfellow as one of the great formal
innovators of this period, and in addition to Longfellow, I would also mention
[John Greenleaf] Whittier, Herman Melville, George Moses Horton, George Henry Boker, Lucy Larcom, and Ethelinda Beers. These are all poets who are
writing rhymed, metrical verse, but who are experimenting within that
framework.

Do you see wildly different things coming from Northern and Southern
poets?
The similarities between Northern and Southern poems far outweigh the
differences. ... Both sides are arguing that God is on their side. Both
sides—and this is particularly startling to us as 21st-century readers—are
arguing they’re fighting for independence, although obviously they’re using that
word quite differently with quite different meanings.

You write that popular song and poetry became closely connected in a
new way during the war years. Are poets writing specifically with the idea that
their poems would quickly be turned into songs?

It goes both ways. In some cases you have composers
taking up poems and saying, “I like this a lot—let me set it to music.” And then
in other cases, as in Julia Ward Howe’s case
[with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”], you have a
poet saying, “This ‘John Brown’s Body,’ that’s an interesting poem. Let me see
if I could do a different kind of approach to it in my lyrics.” And it’s clear
that Howe hoped that her lyrics would be sung, but also that she intended to
circulate it as a poem. So its first appearance is in the Atlantic
Monthly, where it appears on the page as a poem, but then it’s quickly put
into sheet music so people can play it at home and soldiers can sing it.

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is such a fascinating case, because
it’s still ubiquitous. How did that particular poem become the most lasting
anthem of the Civil War?
Yes, it still has this huge cultural pull. Think about all the ceremonies
after 9/11 where “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was performed. It’s a song
that has extraordinary cultural staying power. ...
First of all, the song that she’s imitating, “John Brown’s Body,” is a very
interesting song in which you have soldiers basically performing their bravado
about how many of them will die in battle, and that’s all right. So the refrain
of that song is “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul
goes marching on.”
So it’s a very typical kind of marching song for soldiers, saying, “Many of
us are going to die, and we don’t care!” Howe takes that tune and lifts the
lyrics up to a more lofty, less graphic tone. ... [But] the overwhelming
argument of that song, verse after verse, is that God supports our violent
actions. That’s why I find it so deeply disturbing culturally that it’s in such
wide use now.

You’ve talked about how lots of Civil War poetry is unfairly
dismissed as overly conventional, but in contrast to that, you actually see
Emily Dickinson as more traditional in some ways than her critical reputation
suggests. Can you explain that?
The first scholars to approach Dickinson potentially as being a war poet—I’m
thinking of the ’80s and ’90s—tended to read Dickinson as a poet who’s deeply
skeptical about nationalistic ideologies and deeply skeptical about the rise of
militarism and patriotic rhetoric in the Union. ...
I’m of the opinion that she does both things: that she thinks skeptically and
quizzically about the war, the nationalist rhetoric and patriotic fervor that
sort of drove the nation to war; but I think she also writes poems of grief and
mourning that suggest that death in battlefield is a noble and good thing. In
this sense I think she really belongs to her community of Amherst. She writes to
and from that community, and these poems of grief and mourning that are supposed
to offer consolation to herself, to her family, to others, not surprisingly
share in some of the sentiments of that community. But it’s an unusual reading
of Dickinson to suggest she’s participating in that kind of sentimental
rhetoric.

Dickinson and Whitman are sometimes taken as the only “interesting”
poets of the war years. Is the broad range of Civil War poetry under appreciated
by contemporary scholars?
Edmund Wilson was very influential in dismissing this work as “versified
journalism.” ... It’s also the case that scholars were reluctant to approach
this body of work because the “But is it any good?” question persists much more
strongly with poetry than it does with prose texts. If we pick up the dime
novels that were written in the Civil War era, the political thrillers about
female spies, we don’t expect those works to have the kind of narrative or
linguistic complexity of Moby-Dick, but we still find them interesting
and worthy of study.

You propose that mid-19th-century poets—beyond Dickinson and
Whitman—influenced modernist preferences for things like skepticism,
introspection, and fragmentation. But that influence, too, has gone mostly
unacknowledged.
Another feature of Civil War–era poetry that has made scholars very
uncomfortable in approaching it is all those national commitments writ large in
the poetry. The fact that people took up their cause and proclaimed for it is
something that has made critical approaches to the work more challenging, more
difficult. ...
Undergraduates often find it very moving and powerful. They don’t have the
whole trained scholarly apparatus to think, “Well, this is boring and
uninteresting because of its formal regularity.” Instead, they read the poems on
their own terms on the page and still find a kind of power in them that
19th-century readers found in them.

Do you see a way for poetry to get back to that point of engaging
directly with political issues of the day, and being heard when it does
so?

I don’t think that contemporary poets are
disengaged politically. On the contrary. ... The issue is that the cultural
position of poetry is quite dramatically changed. In a way, the readership of
poetry is a much narrower segment of the reading population. These days I think
we think—not me as part of that “we,” but a lot of people—if you asked people,
“In what literary genre do you think the most important philosophical questions
of the 21st century are being debated?,” people would say right away, “The
novel. You have to go to that weighty, hefty, complex genre to really grapple
with important political issues.” I don’t think that’s true at all. ... Myung Mi Kim is [a] poet I would cite as someone
who is really thinking about global identity, about the political legacies of
violence and nationalism, as an ongoing preoccupation for her in her work.

If you were tasked with naming an official national poet for our
current political season, someone for every American to read, whom would you
pick?

George Moses
Horton. First, his life story is just so fascinating. The idea that someone
who was an enslaved African American could have made a living [as a poet]—and
that is what Horton did, made a living for himself a poet while still
enslaved.

And then the work is just astonishing. Horton’s work has been unfairly
dismissed as being imitative, as being facile. He does do all sorts of things
stylistically. So he imitates Romantic poetry in some cases, he imitates
neoclassical poetry in other cases. As a young man, he supports himself by
writing love poems made to order for young white male students at the University
of North Carolina.

I think the work holds up very well for
contemporary readers. There’s such a mix of ideas and commitments. There’s this
poem “Weep,” which is lamenting the downfall of the
South, the devastation of the South, but it’s also just lamenting how deeply
divided the nation has become, and the devastation of war. This is a poem that I
think about in relation to our contemporary political context, where we have
such deep divisions and so much anger on both sides, and so little common
ground, seemingly, between the right and the left.

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About Me

Welcome to my Civil War blog! Here I will discuss all things Civil War with the ocassional odd ball article thrown in for good measure. My main focus will be book and magazine reviews.
I earned a B.A. in American Studies from Stetson University. My hope is to be able to return to school and further my formal education in the field of history with a focus on the Civil War.

BOOK REVIEW POLICY

While almost all books I review come from my own collection I am always willing to take a look at YOUR book whether you be a publisher or author. I will treat your work in a fair and professional manner. A link will be provided to the publisher web site and when possible a link is also included to Amazon for those who wish to learn more or make a purchase. Reviews are cross posted on Amazon.com. If you provide a complimentary copy a small notation of thanks will be provided at the end of the review. If you would like to contact me please email me at reddfamilyhistory at yahoo dot com OR robertredd at att dot net.